Tech News for 10-28-09

GeoCities, the popular free web hosting service which has been in existence since 1994, was officially shuttered on October 26th. Yahoo bought the service in 1999, allowing early web surfers to publish their own websites for free, causing the service to become a hit in the early Internet age when most other hosting options were expensive. All of the files and data on GeoCities will be deleted as a result of the closing; Owners of websites hosted on GeoCities were contacted by Yahoo and told to backup their websites.

Amazon has announced that they are working on a Kindle application for Windows computers which will allow their customers to download Kindle books and read them on their computer. Amazon has previously announced a Kindle app for the iPhone and is rumored to be working on a another one for Mac computers, as well. The multiple Kindle applications and the Kindle device itself will be able to sync digital e-book purchases so that you can access any of the books that you have purchased on each device and/or application. The Windows Kindle application will be free.

Mozilla, the creators of the well known web browser Firefox, have been working on creating a program called Raindrop, which intends to unify email, Facebook and Twitter communication into a single interface. Raindrop will be a web application instead of a downloadable program. The company stated that they intend to support front-end software, including applications for mobile devices that can use the web-based service. A beta is currently available on the Mozilla Labs website.

~Bryan Scheiber is a Systems Administrator in Metro Detroit. He can be reached at: bryan@bryzo.com